1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for information processing, a program, and a recording medium, and in particular, relates to an information processing apparatus and method capable of more appropriately performing a process for recommendation of a predetermined item, a program, and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recommendation systems for recommending a predetermined item, e.g., a television (TV) broadcast program are becoming widespread. The recommendation systems are broadly divided into two types, “recommendation based on user taste” and “recommendation based on short-term user interest or habit” (refer to, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication Nos. 2007-043471, 2007-323398, and 2004-192460).
In a related-art recommendation system based on user taste, taste of a user is learned on the basis of metadata added to an item which the user takes some kind of action on, e.g., the user viewed or bought. An item to be recommended is determined by processing, e.g., matching on the basis of the learned taste and pieces of metadata (hereinafter, “metadata blocks”) added to respective items as targets to be recommended (hereinafter, “recommendation targets”).
In a related-art recommendation system based on short-term user interest or habit, a next program of a serialized drama or that of a series is recommended on the basis of user habit.
In the recommendation system based on user taste, an item that matches user taste can be recommended to some extent. In some cases, however, a next program of a serialized drama or a series which the user views is not recommended properly. One of factors is that metadata added to an item provides a small amount of information, processing such as matching is performed on the basis of such small amounts of information, and a wrong item is thus selected. In some cases, when metadata added to an item which should be recommended to a user provides a small amount of information, another item provided with metadata providing a large amount of information is selected and recommended.
In the recommendation system based on short-term user interest or habit, information relating to short-term interest or habit of a user includes, for example, information indicating that the user records a program which is broadcasted from 8.00 p.m. on Monday every week. In this case, programs broadcasted from 8:00 p.m. on Monday can be recommended. If the programs broadcasted in this time zone include a next program of a serialized drama or a series, the program can be properly recommended.
However, if the serialized drama broadcasted in this time zone ends and the coming serialized drama does not match the user taste, the coming drama is recommended to the user. Furthermore, assuming that recommendation is performed using information, indicating a time zone or a broadcast station, associated with a program programmed to be recorded as a program which the user happened to be interested in, namely, a program programmed to be recorded on the basis of short-term interest, if a time zone or broadcast station associated with a program which the user is not interested in matches that of the programmed program, wrong recommendation is performed. In the above-described recommendation based on short-term interest or habit, a program that matches user taste is not necessarily recommended.